In the company of monsters

Tumblr feed for my tabletop blog, monstrouscompany.blogspot.com. Run by @gay-for-ocypete.

[monstrous-company]

Dragons

(Wrote up most of this about 2 years ago. Haven't posted here in nearly 4 years but I write a lot of unfinished things and never publish the

I haven't used this blog in nearly 4 years but I went and posted something that's been sitting in my drafts for a while. I hope it's enjoyable.

[forthegothicheroine]

I’m not a classicist, but I suspect one of the reasons so many of the Greek gods are portrayed so unflatteringly was less because they were seen as villains than because they represented their domains.  Of course Zeus sometimes misuses his power, that’s what a king does.  Of course Artemis’s wrath is wild and painful, that’s what nature can be.  Of course Hades snatched away a young girl from her mother’s arms, that’s what death does.  This is one of the reasons callout posts for some gods comparing them negatively to ‘nicer’ gods are kind of missing the point.

[selavy]

as someone who is partially a classicist, this is a better analysis of Greek mythology as a whole than 99.95% of the takes I’ve seen on here (and a substantial number of the takes I’ve seen in ~academia~)

[theoutcastrogue]

This is a terrible analysis, and it dismays me how popular it’s become. Greek gods are portrayed unflatteringly because that’s how polytheism works. If you’re looking for role models, you’re in the wrong genre. And if you’re looking for deities whose personality neatly corresponds with their portfolio, try D&D pantheons.

Why gods aren’t nice

In the real world, people didn’t care to imagine their gods as good or moral, they had absolutely no reason to do that. Instead, they needed to imagine them as

powerful

bribeable

fickle

On a fundamental level, that’s what a god is. You want them powerful so that they can give you what you ask (crops, rain, health, wealth, a successful birth, a victorious battle, whatever). You want them bribeable so that they’ll want to give you what you ask, in exchange for offerings, prayers, honours, sacrifices. And you want them fickle so that when you – inevitably – DON’T get what you ask, although you kept your part of the deal, you can attribute it to their fickleness, otherwise you’ll have to admit they don’t have the power to help you, and the entire edifice of your religion collapses.

(An alternative to fickle is “inscrutable”. Surely the deity has a perfectly good explanation why my demand wasn’t met, but I, a mere mortal, cannot fathom it.)

That said, the parallel Zeus / king does have merit. Of course people are gonna imagine their chief god somewhat like a mortal chief. If they didn’t have mortal chiefs, they wouldn’t have made up an immortal one!

Why gods don’t represent their domains

For starters, the gods’ “domains” weren’t defined that rigidly, neither were they universally agreed on. (Please don’t extrapolate from the classical period’s Aristotelian obsession with categories, and putting everything into little boxes. On the ground, things were fluid. There wasn’t even a consensus on which gods are The Twelve.) When we say stuff like “the cult of Hecate in Argos”, we mean a local worship with local characteristics, and ancient greek religion was simply a collection of cults. In Corinth Hecate was worshipped differently and perceived differently, and none of it was set in stone, things changed as centuries passed. So while today we can open a book or a wikipedia page and list all the “domains” of Hecate (goddess of witchcraft and crossroads and the moon and stuff!), these don’t cover everything, and they didn’t always apply. They are just a reduction. It ain’t D&D.

Second, for the purposes of worship, “domains” didn’t matter that much. The major religious festivals were organised by the city-states, and the decision “which god to honour” was based on custom and the city’s patron deity. Privately, people gave offerings primarily to THEIR gods – the deities of their city, their village, or their family – regardless of “domains”. (Remember, religion is bribery asking for favours, and what’s the most important thing in favours? It’s who you know.)

People also travelled to famous temples in other places, because they’d heard that if you leave an offering to THAT god in THAT temple, you’ll get what you asked for. (Religious tourism was part of the economy; cities and islands that were poor in resources might make up for it with a temple and a fake story.) And again, the gods’ portfolios were secondary: what mattered most was their perceived power, and willingness to grant wishes in this specific location.

Secondary doesn’t mean completely insignificant, mind you. People did petition the gods for things that pertained to their “domains”. You’d invoke Hera when you were about to get married, and Poseidon when you were about to set sail. But there was also a lot of overlap. Like, whom did you invoke when you were about to give birth? Eileithyia, Artemis, Persephone, Hera? Yes. So does that mean that people felt compelled to imagine all these different deities with a personality that reflects the same domain, in this case “childbirth”? No. And they very obviously didn’t.

Finally, while the famous greek gods do have a personality, which we can derive from their stories and hymns and such (though they’re not set in stone by any means: it’s a millennia-spanning collaborative product of oral/written tradition, so there are wild discrepancies and conflicting characterisations and mutually exclusive variants all over the place), this is not a requirement in polytheism. The aforementioned Eileithyia arguably doesn’t HAVE a personality. And yet, as far as worship goes, she was the most important goddess of childbirth in the entire ancient greek world.

It’s not them, it’s us

Basically, we, today, care about the greek gods’ stories and personalities a lot more than the people who actually made them up and worshipped them. Like, orders of magnitude more. Consider: we know a lot about the period when tons of new god-stories were being created, in real time, and acted on stage. Plays were subject to a lot of criticism at the time (“your language sucks!”, “your plot is so contrived you could only resolve it with a deus ex machina!”, “your message is frivolous!”, “you’re boring!”), but no one ever accused them of mischaracterising the gods (or anyone else, for that matter). Like, nobody ever said “Apollo wouldn’t do that!”. And that’s because:

people really didn’t care; consistent characterisation? what’s that?

they’re gods, they do what they want, that’s their whole point!

So let’s not extrapolate from us to them. All they wanted to do was get shit done with a little divine help. But then they started giving money and honours to poets and playwrights, and it kinda got out of hand, and by a quirk of history these stories survived to this day, and now here we are.

[monstrous-company]

The Mothman

[From 1966 to 1967 in the town of Point Pleasant, West Virginia, a strange humanoid creature was spotted. It had glowing red eyes and gre...

New post over on Monstrous Company- a discussion on the Mothman as an ancient deity, moths, and fate.  

[monstrous-company]

Dragonology - The Knucker

[While I was always interested in animals and myths, the Dragonology books were what really got me into monsters . The beautiful Douglas C...

This week’s post on Monstrous Company is going to be late, so here’s last week’s post- a monster based on a staple of nerddom for me.

[thecreaturecodex]

Sahkil, Camazotz

“Bat Creature” © Jose Pericles, accessed at his ArtStation here

[Commissioned by @gay-for-ocypete​. Camazotz appears in the Popol Vuh, the creation story of the K’iche’, but the role is somewhat obscure. Namely, depending on who you ask, there is either one Camazotz, or a whole host of camazotz. The name means “death bat”, and multiple monstrous bats are encountered at once. Such confusion isn’t exactly uncommon in mythology (see how a single satan, a prosecuting angel in the Book of Job, developed into The Satan). Pathfinder has a singular Camazotz already, and the commissioner wanted a species of them as powerful fiends. I made them sahkils because of the presence of Xilbaba as Pathfinder’s sahkil central, and to go with other “environmental sahkils” like my borda and fear liath.]

Sahkil, Camazotz CR 15 NE Outsider This creature looks like a parody of a bat warped into human shape, but more terrible than either. Its body seems to drink in the light around it, and its teeth are honed to a razor’s edge.

The camazotz are sahkils associated with the fear of caves and the subterranean reaches of the world. They use darkness and confinement to their advantage, and are able to fit through surprisingly small cracks and crevices despite their size. They lurk in places where the boundaries between the Material and Ethereal planes are thin, and are considered by many to be the guardians of Xilbaba, the realm of the sahkils. One of their favorite sports is to use their spell-like abilities to reshape tunnels, closing off some passageways while rendering others hazardous, confounding attempts to map their lairs.

If they have the space, camazotz make hit and run attacks, weaving into melee range to inflict bleeding wounds or deadly touch attacks. If forced to ground, they will grab enemies in their claws and attempt to tear them to pieces. The darkness protects camazotz from many direct attacks, and if there is no natural darkness around, a camazotz will generate magical darkness. Their teeth are so sharp that they can sever a head in a single blow. These decapitated heads are often kept as trophies and used as grisly balls for sports.

Keep reading

[monstrous-company]

Qalea Sirrush

Or: The Golden City On the eastern coasts of Beshabha there lies a city entirely of gold.  Or, at least, rumored to be entirely of gold.

Beginning the blogroll with a discussion of a great staple of mythology- a dragon.